The untimely passing of Christopher Hitchens --and the outpouring of prayers for his atheist soul from the Christian internet-- reminds me of something I meant to remark a few weeks' back when that other lodestar of the axis of unbelieval, Richard Dawkins, claimed that if Jesus knew then what we know now, he'd be an atheist, too.

Jesus was a great moral teacher and I was suggesting that somebody as
intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we
know today.

Believers responded with either apologetics, mockery, or both (see that link), but I think they missed the lead: Dawkins wants to claim Jesus.

I say let him. It may not be intellectually tenable to claim Jesus was a great moral teacher if he isn't who he said he was. But so what? If Dawkins wants to follow Jesus' moral teaching without believing he is God, more power to him. That is, in fact, precisely what the Pope recommends to people who don't believe in Christianity & the Crisis of Cultures. Live as if you believed.

Similarly, Hitch's Christian eulogists (self included), are all a bit mystified by his professed atheism, and by his zeal to spread it.

He seems to have been "a seeker," a thing he once admitted all his Christian friends called him, though he himself disliked the term and wouldn't concede that's what he was. I would go a little further and say he was a Christian. Not a believer, obviously, but someone so shaped by Christian culture that he retained its trappings even while rejecting its content.

In god is not great he wrote a whole book laying every bad thing that's ever happened at the feet of religion. To the rational objection that no religious malfeasance can hold a candle to the evils wrought by militant atheism in the 20th and 21st centuries, his rejoinder is that fascism and nazism renounced God but were still so informed by Christianity that they remained missionary in nature, so militant atheism is also religion.

I call BS on that, but for the sake of argument, does Hitch not have to apply the same reasoning to himself? I think that explanation (well, that and let's-make-a-buck-off-the-zeitgeist) does largely account for why today's atheists feel the need to proselytize. It's because they're still so very Christian. They can empty the faith of content, but keep right on doing what Christians do: evangelize.